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I’M AN OLD COWTHIEF AND I LOVES MY BEEF!
CADWALLON – CITY OF THIEVES
Ki Yi Yippee Yippee Yaa!
Dear children, do NOT break into other people’s houses, do NOT crack open jewel boxes, and do NOT burgle whatever you can get – that is against the rules! Except, of course, in “Cadwallon – City of Thieves” – it IS the rules there. In this game, you lead a gang of four thieving characters, in most cases – very politically correct – equally composed of males and females.
Playing pieces – finely detailed, unfortunately all in plain grey plastics, although it is easy to distinguish your gang by their coloured stands – are moved on the equally nice looking game board representing a shabby town’s quarter. They may enter buildings through doors or windows to do their job: looting! Whoever gains the biggest loot (toy coins, called “Ducats”, because there is a Duke in Cadwallon) in the end (usually after round seven) and carries the money out of town into safety, wins.
In order to increase the complexity of the game – since all characters have equal statistics (four movement points, two six sided dice in combat, four intelligence points to help opening padlocks) and one special ability or attribute of their own (for example, one thief is more skilful while stealing, another one better when haggling over their share with the guild of fences) –, there are some additions to the basic game mechanism. Each gang starts out with seven action points to spend in each round, disposable as you wish (or rather see tactically appropriate). Every character may move once and perform one single action (steal, fight) each turn. In addition, if possible, they may enact their special skill or ability. Some of these have to be paid for (with action point markers) – there is such a point expensive character in every gang. Each gang have at their disposal a hand of action cards (so called Arcana-Cards), one drawn at the start of each of your turns. You may almost always, even during another player’s turn, play some or even all of these cards (exception: during combat only one card per player taking part in that fight). These Arcana-Cards may have an effect in combat or allow characters to walk through walls or yield some similar actions.
Before each game you choose a scenario to play. The matching cardboard sheet states the most important basic rules for that set-up – e. g., will the city militia be involved, molesting the gang members? How many rounds does this particular scenario last? Will all the exits be open at the end, or will there be some barriers to prevent the way out? There are eight different sheets. No additional scenarios have been released to date, not even on the internet, although there are some new advancement rules as well as a handful of new action cards. In addition, the gangs may or have to fulfil scenario specific tasks – steal the duke’s treasure, prevent an Undead invasion in the Night of the King of Ashes (probably similar to the Alpine tradition of the Perchtenlauf, only less creepy and less alcohol involved), or maybe rescue the duke’s daughter from her captors.
“Cadwallon – City of Thieves” is set in the adventurous fantasy world of Rackham’s role playing games, a big and prosperous city, not (not yet) involved in the war of Rag’narok, ravaging the land. All the looting parties haunt the same, rather shabby quarter of that city. The game components of “City of Thieves” are for the most part excellent, the games rules are short, precise, feature lots of fine pictures and sufficiently explanatory examples of game play and are quite easy to learn (although there is, as has been said many times before with many other games, a pitiable lack of structure and indexing). The balance between strategic planning possibilities and random effects is rather good, maybe with an oh so slight tip to the random effects due to card drawing. Actually, this game could work well, some of the scenarios sound interesting, even intriguing. Unfortunately the basic situation and task stay the same for all set-ups: stealing treasure from buildings (almost in every scenario you know what is inside from the beginning), and in the end the gang having secured most Ducats win, even if they lost a gang member or two. This puts a limit to any ambition to play “Cadwallon” over and over again. At the latest when one has played all eight scenarios once (that is, if one remains interested that long), it will not be very tempting to take the game from the shelf once more. In fact, even now there is no ambition left to think about bringing forth our own set of house rules to enhance game play. The main reason to go for this game at the moment is to get the hands on the beautiful miniature models inside. Hopefully the game’s designers Bernard (Affenparty, Jumbo 2003) and Pouchain (Okko, Asmodée 2008) will launch some reasonable adjustment rules in the near future.
Martina & Martin Lhotzky, Marcus Steinwender
Spieler : 2 – 4
Alter : ages 12+
Dauer : ca 60 min
Autor : Pascal Bernard, Laurent Pouchain
Grafik : Miguel Coimbra, Nicolas Fructus et al.
Titel : Cadwallon City of Thives
Preis : ab 45 Euro
Verlag : Dust Games / Truant Spiele 2010
Genre : A game of position and acquisiton
Zielgruppe : For families
Version : de
Rules : de en es fr it
In-game use of language : yes
Kommentar:
Beautiful components
Similar game flow despite different scenarios
Playable already at ages 10+
Vergleichbar:
Schätze des Dunklen Turmes
Martin, Martina und Marcus:
Exquisite game components and intriguing scenarios fail to combine into exciting game play, even though most of the necessary requirements are present.
Meine Wertung: 4
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